Hermel

The German language demands a more precise and sober style, whereas English tolerates more sloppy expressions. One common technique to work around that is to just use English terms when there is no catchy German one. In German marketing, this is done all the time. So in your case, you are fine sticking to speed bump.

Btw: my favorite word for speed bump is the Dutch "drempel". It is quite onomatopoetic. My favorite term for speed bumps in German comes from Comedian Helge Schneider. He calls them "Teerwülste" (tar bulges). I don't think you find it being used, but it fits the German style very well as it is precise and sober.

Free speech is much more restricted in Europe than in de United States.

No, the fundamental issue with carbon credits is its economics. It would be much healthier to set a fixed price for carbon emissions. This price should be based on the externalities caused by the emissions. In the worst case, the price is the cost of extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere again. Such a fixed price, a carbon tax, would help the industry because it would make production costs more predictable, and it would be much more fair than carbon credits assigned to those firms that hire the best lobbyists. When fixing the emission quantity instead of its price, the price of carbon credits tend to either go to 0 (if there are too many) or infinity (if there are not enough) at the end of a credit period, which is total nonsense. However, for politicians, carbon credits are much more attractive because being able to distribute them gives them power.

More and more countries are implementing an "exit tax" when wealthy people try to give up their citizenship. Also, the US authorities make it increasingly hard to do so. I wouldn't recommend anyone to become a US citizen. Once you are in, it is very costly to get out again.

There are various valid use cases for companies without business. Examples include:

- International holding companies: if there is Coca Cola France and Coca Cola Germany that economically belong together, you might not be able to just merge them into one entity for legal reasons (both countries might require you to have a locally incorporated presence). So to ensure that both always have the same owners, you create an international holding company that owns both of them.

- Investment funds: investment funds (especially passive ones) are companies whose only business is to own shares in other companies. There is no "real" operating business.

- Feeder funds: sometimes, the law requires foreign investment funds to create a local shell company to be allowed to accept investments from local retail investors. In this case, the only purpose of the shell company is to fulfill local regulatory requirements with regards to the legal form if the investment vehicle and to provide investors with someone local that they can hold liable in case things go wrong. There is no real business in such companies.

In fact, it is often regulation that requires you to create shell companies. If you want to get rid of shell companies, you should start by removing regulation that requires the creation of shell companies with no real business except to satisfy the regulators.

Technically, the state does not have the monopoly on money. The majority of the money supply is created by commercial banks through credit. But the commercial banks are so strictly regulated through capital requirements that the de facto decision about what purposes the banks are allowed to print money for is under centralized control. The ECB even thinks about using capital requirement rules to nudge banks towards green investments, which would be a departure from their mandate of monetary stability.

> I disagree -- this is the correct thing to do if you believe it is not possible for the checked exception to occur.

If it is not possible to occur, then it should not be part of the API.

The only time I rethrow a checked exception as an unchecked exception is when the code is still under construction. The default of the eclipse code generator is to log and ignore caught transaction. I think wrapping into an unchecked one is the better default behavior for incomplete code under a "fail fast" policy.

Depends on your position and motivation. I myself am always reachable and read my emails day and night. I enjoy being involved with my company just as others enjoy checking their personal emails every hour.

So why do even the official website of the European commission and the European parliament have a cookie consent button? One would assume that they are not "capitalist services".

I think it is about curation.

No, it is very productive. From this principle, one can derive many important properties of an optimal legal system, most notably that laws should be technology-neutral. If a law needs to be changed every ten years, then it is not a very well-designed law.

No, a good legal system cannot be outrun by technology. A good legal system provides sound foundations based on principles. Fraud is fraud, regardless of whether it is committed offline or online. Just like source code, legal code can be more or less well-designed, and it can yield more or less desirable outcomes. And in this case, the outcome the US legal system produced was much worse than "not perfect". The law failed to provide legal certainty and the authorities failed to provide clarity as well. Let's hope the courts will do their job -- a process that unfortunately can take many years.

A good legal system provides legal certainty. It has clean and concise laws that are straight-forward to apply. In case of uncertainty, the responsible authorities should provide guidance on what they believe is the right interpretation. None of this has happened in the case at hand. The applicable (?) laws are not clear and the responsible authorities refused to provide guidance. This is poison for innovation and entrepreneurship as it makes doing business in the US unnecessarily risky. Resolving these questions in court should only be the measure of last resort as this process is slow and costly.

Exactly, so Page and Brin might think that they can pull the same trick again.